From Pisanello and Dosso Dossi to William Holman Hunt and Richard Dadd: paintings showing butterflies.
Dadd
David and Bathsheba, Romeo and Juliet – balconies are a useful device for painter, and not just to tell stories. Goya, Manet, and beyond.
Shepherds and shepherdesses painted in stories, from classical myth, through the Bible and Christ’s nativity, to epic poetry, including Milton’s Paradise Lost.
The first of two looking at the telling of English legends in paintings: Robin Hood and his ‘Merry Men’, popular for the last 500 years.
A look back at some of my favourite articles on painters and painting, from Moreau and Salome, to Merson’s tame wolf.
In memory of Richard Dadd: ten of his best, and thoughts about his life and work. Would we have been any better towards him even now?
The decline and fall of Medea, as her sorcery is used for murder, and she kills her own infant sons. Paintings by Delacroix, Turner, and others.
In 1864, he was transferred to the newly-built Broadmoor Asylum. Despite that disruption, he continued to paint.
Domenicus van Wijnen’s paintings are radically original, quite unlike other works before him, and not matched for more than a century after. Why don’t we know him and these paintings better?
In which Dadd becomes a nineteenth-century Bosch on some seriously psychotropic drugs. It is a masterpiece like no other.
